Key Benefits of Using Unica Affinium Campaign eMessage

Unica’s advancements in its eMessage architecture and functionality have leveled the playing field between itself and its email competitors. The application offers core email capabilities including:

• Easy to use, integrated HTML and text editor
• Ability to re-use templates and create standard footer or privacy modules
• Email and SMS delivery to wireless devices
• Ability to process inbound emails (i.e., undeliverable, bouncebacks, out of office) through configuration rules
• Sophisticated security integration
• Automated response tracking across response types for closed loop reporting
• Additive CAN-SPAM compliant email marketing communications

Affinium Campaign eMessage’s true differentiator, however, is its ability to integrate tightly with the rest of the Affinium Suite, especially Campaign, and enable complete cross-channel marketing and analysis. Benefits include:

• Ease and speed for establishing event triggered communications. Setting up post-purchase email correspondence, a birthday or anniversary contact, or a follow-up to an abandoned shopping cart with a specific offer to that customer related to the items he/she left in the cart can all be done easily within the Affinium Campaign suite and shared database. Alternative solutions require multi-step data processing and custom coding.
• Response tracking. Affinium Campaign eMessage captures all email and internet responses within the Unica system tables and then can be fully integrated within the campaign response tracking process. By using eMessage, you will have seamless response coding between Affinium Campaign and e-mail including cells, offers, and campaigns. Affinium Campaign eMessage also comes with its own set of pre-packaged Affinium Reports.
• Standard Suppression. Using another tool for email marketing necessitates at least two sets of suppression lists. Keeping these in sync requires custom code, data integration and added levels of support which usually translates to inaccurate contact / promotion history.
• Greater levels of personalization made easier. All personalization variables are created and accessible from within the same application. This eliminates the need to have significant offline communication between two different system owners to ensure the right personalization field is included within the creative and/or dataset.
• Campaign sophistication. The most important integration benefit between Campaign and eMessage is the commonality of terms and the sophistication of creating multi-segment, multi-offer, multi-wave campaigns. E-mail ASP providers typically have a very simplistic view of campaigns (i.e., one target audience, one offer, one campaign code). When integrating Affinium Campaign with an ASP, organizations often need to “dumb down” the campaign or may lose relationships between campaigns due to the disconnect between the complexity possible in Affinium Campaign and the simple structure within the ASP.

Using an ASP to Manage Email Campaigns

You can still have a very efficient email campaign process, effective personalization and quality response tracking if you are not using eMessage. However, as noted in the section above, not using Campaign eMessage will add a few integration steps and some complexity into your overall campaign process. Below is a high-level depiction of a process to keep your Unica Campaign and external system(s) in sync. The items highlighted with a star are steps that would be eliminated or drastically reduced by using eMessage.

Critical considerations when integrating Affinium Campaign with an email ASP:

• List synchronization. Opt outs, unsubscribes and invalid email addresses will inevitably become out of synch between the two systems unless a process is in place to routinely clean the list. This cleanup can happen on a per campaign basis (as illustrated above) or by sending a routine email suppression list update between the two systems (i.e., weekly).
• Personalization checkpoints. Given the disconnected systems, checkpoints need to be added to the process to ensure that 1) Unica is sending all the correct personalization data in the expected fields and 2) the HTML creative is pointing or utilizing the correct personalization elements.
• Email response attribution. Your data flow will need to ensure that promotion / contact history is accurate across channels and that you are able to receive data across all email response types from the third-party email solution. Most third-party applications have a hard time keeping track of which Unica campaign and/or offer a response is actually tied to, so this might require sophisticated back-end database logic based on other business rules.
• Concept Mapping. Campaign’s concept of segment, campaign, offer, and cell need to be mapped to the ASP’s concept which is often much less sophisticated. The data transfer from Campaign’s output to the ASP will be driven by this mapping.

For more information about how we have used eMessage to provide personalized offers and information to newsletter subscribers, how we have integrated Campaign into several different outsourced ASP solutions, or any of our other AmberLeaf services, including our Database Marketing capabilities, please contact Tim Perry at 312.593.8404 or tperry@amberleaf.net.